21 Lessons for the 21st Century(29)

5


COMMUNITY


Humans have bodies


California is used to earthquakes, but the political tremor of the 2016 US elections still came as a rude shock to Silicon Valley. Realising that they might be part of the problem, the computer wizards reacted by doing what engineers do best: searched for a technical solution. Nowhere was the reaction more forceful than in Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park. This is understandable. Since Facebook’s business is social networking, it is most attuned to social disturbances.

After three months of soul-searching, on 16 February 2017 Mark Zuckerberg published an audacious manifesto on the need to build a global community, and on Facebook’s role in that project.1 In a follow-up speech at the inaugural Communities Summit on 22 June 2017, Zuckerberg explained that the sociopolitical upheavals of our time – from rampant drug addiction to murderous totalitarian regimes – result to a large extent from the disintegration of human communities. He lamented the fact that ‘for decades, membership in all kinds of groups has declined as much as one-quarter. That’s a lot of people who now need to find a sense of purpose and support somewhere else.’2 He promised that Facebook will lead the charge to rebuild these communities and that his engineers will pick up the burden discarded by parish priests. ‘We’re going to start rolling out some tools’, he said, to ‘make it easier to build communities.’

He further explained that ‘We started a project to see if we could get better at suggesting groups that will be meaningful to you. We started building artificial intelligence to do this. And it works. In the first six months, we helped 50 per cent more people join meaningful communities.’ His ultimate goal is ‘to help 1 billion people join meaningful communities … If we can do this, it will not only turn around the whole decline in community membership we’ve seen for decades, it will start to strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.’ This is such an important goal that Zuckerberg vowed ‘to change Facebook’s whole mission to take this on’.3

Zuckerberg is certainly correct in lamenting the breakdown of human communities. Yet several months after Zuckerberg made his vow, and just as this book was going to print, the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed that data entrusted to Facebook was harvested by third parties and used to manipulate elections around the world. This made a mockery of Zuckerberg’s lofty promises, and shattered public trust in Facebook. One can only hope that before undertaking the building of new human communities, Facebook first commits itself to protecting the privacy and security of existing communities.

It is nevertheless worthwhile to consider Facebook’s communal vision in depth, and examine whether once security is beefed up, online social networks can help build a global human community. Though in the twenty-first century humans might be upgraded into gods, as of 2018 we are still Stone Age animals. In order to flourish we still need to ground ourselves in intimate communities. For millions of years, humans have been adapted to living in small bands of no more than a few dozen people. Even today most of us find it impossible to really know more than 150 individuals, irrespective of how many Facebook friends we boast.4 Without these groups, humans feel lonely and alienated.

Unfortunately, over the past two centuries intimate communities have indeed been disintegrating. The attempt to replace small groups of people who actually know one another with the imagined communities of nations and political parties could never succeed in full. Your millions of brothers in the national family and your millions of comrades in the Communist Party cannot provide you with the warm intimacy that a single real sibling or friend can. Consequently people live ever more lonely lives in an ever more connected planet. Many of the social and political disruptions of our time can be traced back to this malaise.5

Zuckerberg’s vision of reconnecting humans to one another is therefore a timely one. But words are cheaper than actions, and in order to implement this vision, Facebook might have to change its entire business model. You can hardly build a global community when you make your money from capturing people’s attention and selling it to advertisers. Despite this, Zuckerberg’s willingness even to formulate such a vision deserves praise. Most corporations believe that they should focus on making money, governments should do as little as possible, and humankind should trust market forces to take the really important decisions on our behalf.6 Hence if Facebook intends to make a real ideological commitment to building human communities, those who fear its power should not push it back into the corporate cocoon with cries of ‘Big Brother!’ Instead, we should urge other corporations, institutions and governments to contest Facebook by making their own ideological commitments.

Of course, there is no lack of organisations that lament the breakdown of human communities and strive to rebuild them. Everybody from feminist activists to Islamic fundamentalists is in the business of community-building, and we will examine some of these efforts in later chapters. What makes Facebook’s gambit unique is its global scope, its corporate backing, and its deep faith in technology. Zuckerberg sounds convinced that the new Facebook AI can not only identify ‘meaningful communities’, but also ‘strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together’. That is far more ambitious than using AI to drive a car or diagnose cancer.

Facebook’s community vision is perhaps the first explicit attempt to use AI for centrally planned social engineering on a global scale. It therefore constitutes a crucial test case. If it succeeds, we are likely to see many more such attempts, and algorithms will be acknowledged as the new masters of human social networks. If it fails, this will uncover the limitations of the new technologies – algorithms may be good for navigating vehicles and curing diseases, but when it comes to solving social problems, we should still rely on politicians and priests.